For real peace to come to NI, ALL sides must put down their guns and remove the violence from their minds.

I'm still hoping that can be done.

Well, they may not be blowing places up anymore, but it looks like they won't be "putting down their guns" for the meantime. Why exactly do they need weapons if they aren't going to return to violence? Is it just bartering, or what? (*stupid politicians*)

I have a question for you guys: What type of government exactly do they have in NI? Have they actually held elections recently? It just seems to me that they've been having "talks" for years now, and *somebody* has to be running the place!

The apology that I've been waiting for. My only question is: will the British government have to swallow its false pride and offer an apology to Sinn Fein one day for falsely accusing it for involvement in the robbery of the Northern Bank in December 2004?

If past British government actions toward the Republican Movement in NI are to be taken into consideration, I have a feeling that we will one day witness a retraction.
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Wednesday February 9, 03:20 PM

Blair sorry for bomb jailings
By Andrew Cawthorne

LONDON (Reuters) - The government has apologised for the suffering caused to 11 people, three decades after they were wrongly jailed for detonating IRA bombs that killed seven people.

Four of them -- the so-called "Guildford Four" -- achieved international fame when their wrongful 15-year jailing was dramatised in the 1993 film "In The Name Of The Father."

"I am very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and such an injustice," Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a brief television statement on Wednesday.

"That's why I'm making this apology today. They deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated," he added.

Blair was speaking as some of the former prisoners, their relatives and campaigners, came to London to pressure the government for a first, high-profile apology.

The Guildford Four and Maguire Seven were blamed for the 1974 pub bombs in Guildford and Woolwich that killed a total of seven people.

Appeal courts overturned the convictions of the four in 1989, and the seven in 1991, amid allegations of falsified evidence and confessions obtained under coercion.

The bombs came at the height of the IRA's attacks on Britain. On ceasefire since the 1990s, the Catholic IRA fought a vicious, three-decade war with security forces in a conflict that cost some 3,600 lives.

"STILL SUFFERING"

Gerry Conlon, the best-known of the Guildford Four, told reporters outside parliament that the lack of a top-level apology until Wednesday had perpetuated their suffering.

"We just feel as if we have still been suffering as if we were in prison," said Conlon.

"I am hoping for some sort of closure on this," he added. "This has dominated two-thirds of my life. This happened when I was 20. I am now coming up to 51. I have had no peace from it."

Blair said he understood their suffering.

"Their loss, the loss suffered by their families, will never go away ... It serves no one for the wrong people to be convicted for such an awful crime," he said.

"I recognise the trauma the conviction caused the Conlon and Maguire families and the stigma which wrongly attaches to them to this day."

Blair, who has made a peace agreement in Northern Ireland one of the priorities of his premiership since 1997, campaigned as a young MP for the release of the Guildford Four.

A deal to seal a final political settlement has stalled after charges the IRA was behind a 26 million pounds bank robbery in the province in December and its withdrawal of a conditional offer to put its weapons beyond use.

If Sinn Fein (or Ian Paisley) were to come clean and have the terrorists (on both sides) rounded up, maybe there might be more of a chance for a true peace. As it is, they harbor them, and are therefore complicit in whatever actions they carry out.

To be honest, I've been in this country so long that when I hear IRA I think "retirement plan"

A friend of mine in the same industry as I am is from NI (I'm from the mildly sectarian West of Scotland where songs about the virtues of the Pope and the Queen and King Billy are learned from a very young age), when I ask him about how he came to the US, his answer was along the lines of "when you're a Catholic Chemistry techer your knowledge is in demand from the wrong people.

Once the IRA and the unionist equivalents disarm, I think real progress can be made.

Until then, let's recognize them for what they are, not "freedom fighters", but just a bunch of murderous thugs.